Over 5,000 People Sign Petition to Ban Oil Spill Dispersants, still time left to sign!

The goal for the petition was 5,000 signatures. Well, it’s reached 5,000 signatures already and there are 12 days left! Let’s help them blow way past that goal.

On April 19, 2013, Government Accountability Project (GAP) released Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf: Are Public Health and Environmental Tragedies the New Norm for Oil Spill Cleanups? The report details the devastating long-term effects on human health and the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem stemming from BP and the federal government’s widespread use of the dispersant Corexit, in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

With the release of the report, GAP also started an online petition to ban oil spill dispersants on TakePart.com. The goal for the petition was 5,000 signatures. Well, it’s reached 5,000 signatures already and there are 12 days left! Let’s help them blow way past that goal.

GAP teamed up with the nonprofit Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN) to launch this effort in August 2011 after repeatedly hearing from Gulf residents and cleanup workers that official statements from representatives of BP and the federal government were false and misleading in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Over the next 20 months, GAP collected data and evidence from over two dozen employee and citizen whistleblowers who experienced the cleanup’s effects firsthand, and GAP studied data from extensive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Taken together, the documents and the witnesses’ testimony belie repeated corporate and government rhetoric that Corexit is not dangerous. Worse than this, evidence suggests that the cleanup effort has been more destructive to human health and the environment than the spill itself.